How can we cultivate more diversity within the environmental humanities? Questions about diversity in many forms will be the focus of this exciting event, exploring issues related not only to race, ethnicity, and gender, but also diverse ways of opening up environmental problems and possibilities in the academy and beyond.
Featured speakers and performances will be grounded in diverse kinds of “soil”: from gardens and nature writing to environmental humanities programs and upcycled music.
Come join us to celebrate 5 years of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) and important new grounds to be explored!
Organizing Committee: Kyle Devine, Pierre du Plessis, Kjetil Fallan, Michael Lundblad
Program
16:00 Doors open
16:45 Welcome and Introductions
Ursula Münster, Associate Professor of the Environmental Humanities and Director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH)
Michael Lundblad, Professor of English-Language Literature (University of Oslo)
17:00 - 18:00 KEYNOTE: How poetry and nature writing can cultivate productive cultural and environmental diversity
Camille Dungy, University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, acclaimed poet and nature writer, and author most recently of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
18:15 - 19:45 ROUND TABLE: Cultivating New Grounds in the Environmental Humanities
Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society/ LMU Munich), Heather Swanson (Aarhus University), Rahul Ranjan (OsloMet University), and Liisa-Rávná Finbog (Tampere University)
Moderated by Ursula Münster
19:45 CLOSING REMARKS
Mette Halskov Hansen, Vice-Rector for Climate & the Environment and Cross-Disciplinarity, UiO
20:00 MUSICAL INTERVENTION, FOOD AND CELEBRATION:
Ane Bjerkan and Mari Lesteberg - “upcycled rhythmic background vibe music”
About Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.
A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations.
Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.